Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday August 08, 2008 @08:56PM
from the no-brownie-points-for-you dept.

rickb928 and several others have written to inform us that three reporters for the French publication "Global Security Magazine" were booted out of the Black Hat convention for uncovering the login information of other reporters. Quoting the AP:
"The separate, wired Internet connections set up for reporters are supposed to be off-limits to hacking and the Wall of Sheep. Even so reporters who didn't take the extra step and log onto the Internet through an additional secure connection like a virtual private network, risked having their data exposed to colleagues sitting just feet away. It didn't appear to be a complicated hack. The network was working properly, but it wasn't set up to shield each journalist's computer from one another."

and even one more difference, from TFA:Organizers said the trio was caught when they took their purloined password prizes to Wall of Sheep workers and asked them to post the information. The workers refused.

Prove a point that the LAN was insecure? They could have used TEMPEST to prove some point, too.

It is allowed to use e.g. sniffers on the Black Hat conference, but the journalist/press cente is exempted; here it is not allowed. In there, journalists are doing their work just like journalists always do their work in a journalist/press centre.

You've never been in such room. Ask any journalist how the atmosphere is, and about the ethics in such room. You don't spy on your collegues there. They don't see each ot

The mistake of the journalist was to assume that any network at all is secure.

They were lucky their account info were only stolen for "fun", I doubt anyone else would have had the decency to tell them they had been compromised.

I will side with the people who think that if you attend a "black hat" conference and dare use a) a computer that you don't own, b) on a network that you don't know, c) to access unencrypted private information, you are fair game.

Well, there used to be. But the time of the romantic Sicilian mafioso is long gone and we are now in the era of the ruthless backstabbing russian gangbangers running corporate multinational. So I guess the one with honor are somewhere at the bottom of lake Michigan or in a retirement pension.:)

Did these journalist not understand what their role was at this event? The Wi-Fi connections were free targets and that was understood. The hard-wired connections were off limits to all involved and only for the press, as I understand it. What were they thinking?

You'd think the organizers of the Black Hat convention could properly secure a wired network.

Which they did. They just didn't secure it from the other journalists.

Consider that it is actually impossible to do so, and allow journalists to bring their own laptops. The best you can do is secure a network, not secure the computers on the network, without insisting on admining each such computer -- think Mordac [wikipedia.org]-style.

What are you talking about. You are completely wrong. The organizers could have done much more.

By properly laying the wiring, they could ensure that you could not set-up such a passive filter. Each group of journalists could have had their own separate connection to a properly configured router - that way, if you wanted to snoop on another journalists traffic, you would have to walk over to their table and jack into their Ethernet connectors, which is significantly mitigates the severity of the problem.

This situation reminds me of the past three ShmooCons I attended. My rule is that if I'm not entirely sure that my computer is hack-proof (an impossibility, I realize, but a goal nonetheless) and I know that I'm not going to be paying enough attention to it to ensure that I would notice if something strange were happening to it...then I don't get on the network and I turn off my wireless antenna so no one can find! When you're in a conference about hacking and computer security, you should expect that your

Each group of journalists could have had their own separate connection to a properly configured router

Implying they could attack each other, still.

With a suitable access lists, and each Journalist's PC plugged into their own port on a Layer 3 switch and everyone NAT'ed, no they would have no normal means of using their legitimate connection to attack another journalist's PC.

For instance, local PC to gateway might be allowed, but there would be no method allowed to have PC to PC or broadcast traffic.

Considering that the reporter's LAN is a temporary guest network set up in a room that was probably ill designed for anything but a basic LAN setup, and that it's primary objective is to let a bunch of non-technical people connect a hodge-podge of random stuff to the internet with a minimum of bother, you seem to expect a lot.

What they are demonstrating is appropriate security. The objective is to get the journalist's machines on the net without anyone having to sacrifice a goat to the security gods.

The way I understand it the network itself was not secure rather than the computer's the journalists using being insecure. If any computer on the network can intercept traffic going through the network then generally that is a problem.

Point well taken, actually I tend to type quickly and go back and proof read prior to posting. Unfortunately, I forgot to change the title but did correct the body of the text. I also hate these mistakes.

So basically the french got kicked not for hacking but for being a bunch of scriptkiddies that wanted to demonstrate they could "hack" a network known to be badly secured. Rightly so. These journalists wouldn't have been able to report on the real hacks; they wouldn't understand them.

I don't understand this very well, so someone who does please chime in.

Switches use your ethernet card's MAC address (not IP) to know how to route ethernet frames on across the switch. It knows that MAC AB:CD:EF:etc is on port 1, and 12:34:56:etc is on port 2. Because you can daisy chain switches, it actually has to remember a many MACs to 1 port sort of mapping.

Switches can only remember a finite number of MAC addresses, so if you overflow the memory of the switch with bogus MAC addresses, it fails over to hub mode and just broadcasts all the packets to all the ports. It's not pretty, and would cause the network to get slower, but at least it would continue to work.

As I can't see hubs being used at a Black Hat conference, I'd guess this is the sort of thing the reporters did. I'm sure there's a name for it... probably "ARP Cache Smashing" or something, but I don't know it.

"ARP poisioning" is what it's called, and your explaination sums it up pretty well. If the other side of a port is claiming to have enough MAC addresses reachable by it the cache will fill and the switch will start over with a blank cache which renders it into a hub until it learns what's really where, then gets poisioned again, rinse, wash, repeat.

Dumb switches will fall for this trick and have no way for anybody to notice, smarter switches will log this and let the admin know there's more than one MAC address being reported on a port... you just trace to who's on the other end of the report and you've busted them.

That's not ARP poisoning, ARP maps layer 3 IP addresses to layer 2 MAC addresses and is a router function rather than a switch one (L3 switches aside). They could have used ARP poisoning for this attack but that's not what is being asked about.

For switches you are talking about MAC flooding which is a pure layer 2 (e.g. Ethernet/MAC) attack and different from ARP poisoning. Layer 2 switching knows nothing of IP addresses so doesn't use ARP.

The switch remembers what MACs are on what ports in a table. If a packet's destination MAC isn't in the table, it gets sent to all ports in the same VLAN (a simple switch may have only 1 VLAN). The reply to that packet (having the same MAC address as the source) will let the switch determine which particular port it should use for that MAC in the future.

If you overflow the table, the switch is forced to flush out all entries and learn them again. When the

Many low-cost switches are simple layer 2 switching bridges, devices that pass packets from one interface to another, electrically segmenting a network into collision domains. If the network had stayed wired with nothing but switches, there wouldn't have been an issue. Let me guess, someone thought some hubs would be a good idea. Congratulations, epic fail.

If only their were experts who knew the specification of network switches and how not to expose users to casual snooping, then we could set up a conference where such people get together to share their knowledge of these type of vulnerabilities.

Are they using a hub for wired connections at a security conference? Seems like the most plausible explanation for a simple "hack" like this with the network "working correctly"...

It's a common misconception that switches prevent snooping. Switches are *not* security devices, they are an performance optimization. As such, they mostly "fail open".

If you flood the switch with many different MAC addresses, such that its internal ethernet routing table fills up, it will usually simply direct *all* traffic to your port, rather than potentially incorrectly dropping some traffic you should have received.

And then you can snoop to your heart's content, with nobody else the wiser.

if you want to burn 4 addresses for every host (host, router, subnet, and broadcast - a ".252"), have a router which can support enough interfaces/VLANs, and want to take the time to configure all that.

Well I would think that
a) they would be using a private IP address range with NAT and therefore have plenty of IP address range to play with.
b) a good admin should be able to use a simple script (be it bash, python, emacs lisp, whatever) to quickly generate configuration files for the hubs and switches and upload them. You would think an organizer of a security conference would have somebody in their rolodex who they could tap to do this efficiently and correctly

A fun and practical way to demonstrate how NOT to set up a network with nodes that shouldn't have to trust each other!

At every place, there are rules and consequences if you break the rules.

Where I work, if you hack into the wireless network and we find out, you get thrown out, and get prosecuted if we can find proof. Same if you hack into the wired network. That's our rules. At Black Hat, if you hack into the wireless network and they find out, your are fine (except for egg on your face if they catch you, and egg on your face if you are hacked). If you hack into the wired network reserved for reporters and they find ou

Even so reporters who didn't take the extra step and log onto the Internet through an additional secure connection like a virtual private network, risked having their data exposed to colleagues sitting just feet away.

Even so people who post stories to Slashdot, should learn to use commas.

One Usenix there was an announcement that everyone who had used Kerberos to log in from the terminal room needed to set up new keys. Another finished with a paper on what someone had sniffed on the Wifi LAN.

So it's no bloody surprise it's happened at Black Hat. Not that the guys who did it were justified, and they're lucky they were just booted out, but anyone who doesn't use encrypted VPNs or encrypted tunnels at ANY technical conference is asking for trouble.

Ok, I agree that in a technical conference people will more likely be exposed, but it doesn't mean it SHOULD.

For the sake fo changing the car analogy, think of a firing range. When you go there, you are specifically told you shoot in a particular area, and told NOT to shoot wildly at will. Going to a firing range doesn't mean you are more exposed to bullets IF people follow the instructions. I shouldn't be required to wear high impact body armor, just because "going to a firing range without body armor i

The separate, wired Internet connections set up for reporters are supposed to be off-limits to hacking and the Wall of Sheep

So while the reporters who got their logins compromised should learn to secure their connections better (just as well at the local pumpkin throwing contest as at a black hat conference), that reporter should've known he'd get into trouble for (getting caught) breaking the rules.

The first rule of computer security is that you don't trust everyone else to be good guys that follow the rules. The second rule of computer security is that some of the people who are inside your organization's primary defense perimeter may be or become untrustworthy.
I think it's funny that it's a reporter for an IT focused paper, not a more general newswire like AP or Reuters, who had their passwords sniffed.

Come on now. If you are reporting the black hat conference, what better way to show you know what you're reporting on than to hack?

Personally, despite any failure on the part of the organizers, I think it admirable that they did a 'little' hacking. Perhaps we can get a new "meme that is never spoken"(TM) like male sportscasters all have stupid ties and bad hair and female sportscasters are Playboy bunny wouldhavebeens. Hacking conference

The other thing to think about is in regards to it being a conference full of hackers. Yes, it seems silly to tell them not to hack the wired connections. On the other hand, did they really think that a thousand hackers wouldn't be able to figure out who was doing the hacking?
I find what they did slightly humorous, but I think they're idiots if they thought they could do it and get away with it.

I disagree. If you yell username and password pairs along with hosts that they work with across a room, that conversation is what we call unprotected. Like there is freedom of speech, there is also freedom to listen. If you're going to broadcast your conversation, without first taking steps to protect that conversation, that conversation is open game to all and sundry. Same with broadcast tv. Brits might disagree with their odd television licensing, but here in the States, we don't need a license to receive

I must report you to the analogy police. This is more like two people sitting in a restaurant speaking at normal volume or lower. You could hear what they are saying if you move closer. If you do so, are you behaving ethically?

Two people are seated in a quiet restaurant with partitions between each table, talking to each other in relative privacy. I'm sitting 3 tables away and can't hear them.

So I make a reservation for 50 of my closest friends to come down. The restaurant has to take down the partitions to make room for the huge party... except all those people never show up, it was a false reservation. However, by overflowing the Active Restaurant Patron tables, I turned the private restaurant into a public one.

If this were any other event, these reporters would be arrested a la Dmitry Sklyarov for violation of the DMCA, and should be sentenced to a billion life sentences without the possibility of parole without the unnecessary step of a time-consuming trial. But given that this is a hacking event, the reporters will probably be hailed as heroes. What is the world coming to?

Just start reading at the second post and do not reply to fist posts, not that hard.. Also The frosty pist at the top of the page tells you your are really on/. and that your DNS has not been hacked and redirected you to some fake./ site.